Store and Publish Data

Due to the Open Science Movement the publishing of one's own research data has increasingly become part of the research process itself. Research funders, such as the SNSF, but also publishers now require their grantees and authors to publish their data together with the publication. The University Library's Open Science Services support you in making your data open.

To make your data FAIR and to ensure that others can access and use your data, the data should be:

• described systematically (consistently) and in detail
• documented with metadata (more on data documentation)
• findable (e.g. by uploading it on a well-known repository)
• citable (e.g. by assigning a persistent identifier such as a DOI)
• published in an open format (see recommended open formats by EPFL)
• licensed as openly as possible while taking data protection issues into account (more on licenses and data protection )

In order for others to be able to reuse your research data, you upload it to a repository, that is, a digital archive. There are three types of repositories:

• discipline-specific repositories
• institutional repositories
• generic repositories

The UZH does not have a data repository. Instead, the use of subject-specific repositories is recommended. The national repository LaRS  is available to the linguistic community for this purpose. Further national subject-specific repositories will follow.

Find out more about repositories at forschungsdaten.info (in German)

You are on the safe side if your repository:

• is used by your research community
• supports the upload of your data type
• is easily findable via search engines
• assigns persistent identifiers (PIDs) such as DOIs or allows ORCiD IDs
• allows for or even requires rich and structured metadata (data documentation)
• allows for different access regulations
• requires the choice of a license

Source: Fact Sheet Research Data Repositories

The easiest way to publish your data is by sharing it via a discipline-specific repository:

• Ask around in your community to find out which repositories are frequently used.
• re3data.org is another good starting point for your research. re3data.org is currently the most important and largest registry of research data repositories world-wide.
• Recommended repositories of funding agencies: The SNSF  and the European Research Commission provide lists of recommended data repositories for their grantees.

If you work with personal and sensitive data, you will need to consider issues of data protection before sharing or publishing your data. Contact your institute's IT coordinator to safely store sensitive data during your project.

More information: The Swiss Competence Center for Social Sciences FORS  offers webinars and documents on data anonymization, informed consent, and on working with sensitive or personal data.

For any other questions related to working with sensitive data, contact us at data@ub.uzh.ch.

The SNSF requires that research data arising from a research project be archived and made available to other researchers, provided that there are no legal, ethical or copyright reasons, confidentiality clauses or similar that prevent this.

Requirements of the SNSF

Recommended data repositories by the SNSF

The Central IT offers the possibility to archive your data for the longer-term. Contact your institute's IT coordinator to ask for details.

Formats for archiving by ETHZ